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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics
"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, was actually a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.
1) Classic anatomical atlases 2) Detailed labeling of the earliest phases of prenatal neurological development 3) Appeals to neuroanatomists, developmental biologists and clinical practitioners. 4) Persistent relevance - brain development is not going to change
In Pursuit of Impact pushes researchers and policymakers to reflect, rethink, and reconnect with their purpose to support the greater good by developing meaningful public policies. Through a multidisciplinary lens, Nadia Ferrara, draws on research, clinical, and policy experience to show how we can engage in learning, and building more effective relationships to better support the development of responsive policies. Ferrara offers a refreshing analysis while integrating a new approach to understanding trauma and resilience that places a humanizing emphasis on the power of narratives and storytelling. Revisiting the theories of pioneer thinkers and showing the relevance of their work is the necessary rethinking required to support the shift towards an evidence-informed policy development process. Ferrara highlights the fact that people, and their own lived realities, are defined by trauma and resilience and are engaged in the development of public policy and are affected by implemented policies. This book is recommended for scholars and practitioners in the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, political sciences, clinical psychiatry, and philosophy.
This reference dictionary takes a new approach to the study of physical anthropology by focusing on the concepts involved. As Stevenson notes at the outset, physical or biological anthropology is a synthetic discipline which has borrowed much from evolutionary biology, anatomy, genetics, medicine, zoology, paleontology, and demography. Thus, although none of the concepts are unique to the discipline, their relative importance and the contexts in which they are used may be. Here, Stevenson presents concise entries describing the development of physical anthropological concepts followed by bibliographies including most of the major works in the field. The history of the usage of each concept is traced from its origins--often outside the discipline of physical anthropology--to the contemporary and usually multidisciplinary contexts in which physical anthropologists participate. Entries clearly delineate both the theoretical development of the concepts under discussion and their applications in physical anthropological practice. The comprehensive bibliographies enable the reader to pursue further study of concepts of particular interest. Indispensable to students just beginning their studies in the field, the dictionary will also be an invaluable reference for scholars and researchers.
Being Human is history made flesh. It will change the way you see the
world.
What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social, and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? Can there be well-being within illness? In this remarkable and thought-provoking book, Havi Carel explores these questions by weaving together the personal story of her own illness with insights and reflections drawn from her work as a philosopher. Carel's fresh approach to illness raises some uncomfortable questions about how we all - whether healthcare professionals or not - view the ill, challenging us to become more thoughtful. Illness unravels the tension between the universality of illness and its intensely private, often lonely, nature. It offers a new way of looking at a matter that affects every one of us. Revised and updated throughout, the third edition of this groundbreaking volume includes a new chapter on organ transplantation. Illness: The Cry of the Flesh will prove essential reading to those studying philosophy, medical ethics, and medical anthropology, as well as those in the healthcare and medical professions. It will also be of interest to individuals who live with illness, and their friends and families.
This book-length ethnography of the revival of a popular religious
temple in contemporary rural China examines the organizational and
cultural logics that inform the staging of popular religious
activities. It also explores the politics of the religious revival,
detailing the relationships of village-level local activists and
local state agents wtih temple associations and temple bosses.
Shedding light on shifting state-society relationships in the
reform era, this book is of interest to scholars and students in
Asian Studies, the social sciences, and religious and ritual
studies.
Academics and non-academics alike have been intrigued by conservative Protestant groups that thrive in secular social and institutional contexts. This book offers an ethnographic study of one such group, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at McMaster University. These conservative Protestants espouse fundamental interpretations of the Bible, women's roles, the age of the earth, alcohol consumption, sexual ethics, and the necessity of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. How does this tiny minority function withing the overwhelmingly secular context of the university? The strategies of the ICVF seem both to strengthen and to mitigate evangelicals' sense of difference from their non-Christian teachers and peers. Bramadat suggests that this model can also be useful for understanding the construction of individual and group identity among other minority groups, both religious and non-religious models.
The term "Caucasian" is a curious invention of the modern age. Originating in 1795, the word identifies both the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains region as well as those thought to be "Caucasian." Bruce Baum explores the history of the term and the category of the "Caucasian race" more broadly in the light of the changing politics of racial theory and notions of racial identity. With a comprehensive sweep that encompasses the understanding of "race" even before the use of the term "Caucasian," Baum traces the major trends in scientific and intellectual understandings of "race" from the Middle Ages to the present day. Baum's conclusions make an unprecedented attempt to separate modern science and politics from a long history of racial classification. He offers significant insights into our understanding of race and how the "Caucasian race" has been authoritatively invented, embraced, displaced, and recovered throughout our history.
Practicing Ethnography in Law brings together a selection of top scholars in legal anthropology, social sciences, and law to delineate the state of the art in ethnographic research strategies. Each of these original essays addresses a particular set of analytical problems and uses these problems to explore issues of ethnographic technique, research methodology, and the theoretical underpinnings of ethnographic legal studies. Subjects explored include the relationship between legal and feminist scholarship, between law and the media, law and globalization, and the usefulness of a wide variety of research techniques: comparative, linguistic, life-history, interview, and archival. This volume will serve as a guide for students who are designing their own research projects, for scholars who are newly exploring the possibilities of ethnographic research, and for experienced ethnographers who are engaged with methodological issues in light of current theoretical developments. The book will be essential reading for courses in anthropological methods, legal anthropology, and sociology and law.
Asians and Latinos comprise the vast majority of contemporary
immigrants to the United States, and their growing presence has
complicated America's prevailing White-Black race hierarchy.
"Imperial Citizens" uses a global framework to investigate how
Asians from U.S.-dominated homelands learn and understand their
place along U.S. color lines. With interviews and ethnographic
observations of Koreans, the book does what others rarely do:
venture to the immigrants' home country and analyze racism there in
relation to racial hierarchies in the United States.
Each family has its secrets, ones that shape family communication and relationships in a way generally unknown to the outsider and often the family itself. Autoethnographers, students of these relationships, confront many silences in their attempts to understand these social worlds. Now issued as a Routledge Education Classic Edition, Accidental Ethnography delves into this shadowy world of pain and loss in the hopes of finding productive, ethical avenues for transforming the secret lives of families into powerful narratives of hope. It merges autoethnographic method with the therapeutic power of storytelling to heal family wounds. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in the field of qualitative research and on his own research journey since the publication of the original edition.
Originally published in 1986, this book draws upon a range of authors to reflect wide interest in systematising traditional medicine, and to include material on significant instances of regulation or organisation. It was the first book to study the efforts of traditional healers and their newly formed professional associations and as such constitutes a pioneering collection of sources. Because of the changing position of traditional medicine it may well also be a unique record: before long what is described here will largely have disappeared.
A diagnosis of dementia changes the ways people engage with each other - for those living with dementia, as well their families, caregivers, friends, health professionals, neighbours, shopkeepers and the community. Medical understandings, necessary as they are, provide no insights into how we may all live good lives with dementia. This innovative volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to focus on dementia as lived experience. It foregrounds dementia's social, moral, political and economic dimensions, investigating the challenges of reframing the dementia experience for all involved. Part I critiques the stigmas, the negativity, language and fears often associated with a dementia diagnosis, challenging debilitating representations and examining ways to tackle these. Part II examines proactive practices that can support better long-term outcomes for those living with dementia. Part III looks at the relational aspects of dementia care, acknowledging and going beyond the notion of person-centred care. Collectively, these contributions highlight the social and relational change required to enhance life for those with dementia and those who care for them. Engaging in a critical conversation around personhood and social value, this book examines the wider social contexts within which dementia care takes place. It calls for social change, and looks for inspiration to the growing movement for relational care and the caring society. Dementia as Social Experience is important reading for all those people who, in various ways, are living with dementia, as well as for those working in this area as clinicians, researcher and carers.
The field of physical anthropology deals with issues that everyone thinks about and cares about: our origins, our evolutionary history, and why we look and act the way we do. The field has benefited greatly by increased attention from the media, from popular books, and from several television series. There is a multitude of topics considered by physical anthropologists, including human and primate origins, primate societies, growth and development, genetics, forensic science, and nutrition. Most physical anthropology graduate students have traditionally aspired to research and/or teaching careers at a university. However, during the last decade there has been an increased interest in non-traditional careers outside the ivory tower, primarily because the number of new physical anthropology Ph.D.s exceeds the number of jobs available in anthropology departments. Because physical anthropology encompasses a variety of research interests, students are broadly trained and have a wealth of talents and skills that make them competitive for non-academic careers. However, pursuing opportunities outside the academy requires thoughtful planning and training. This collection serves as a reference for students contemplating a career in physical anthropology within or outside the academy. Several rewarding career paths that physical anthropologists have chosen are described. Students will understand how anthropological theory, methods, and training are applicable to job responsibilities and career development. This book will also help departments of anthropology design coursework and training programs that will make their students more competitive. In sum, the future of anthropology seems promising given the discipline's broad scope and concern for issues faced by contemporary society, and physical anthropologists will be playing an increased role in many arenas.
Research on health involves evaluating the disparities that are systematically associated with the experience of risk, including genetic and physiological variation, environmental exposure to poor nutrition and disease, and social marginalization. This volume provides a unique perspective - a comparative approach to the analysis of health disparities and human adaptability - and specifically focuses on the pathways that lead to unequal health outcomes. From an explicitly anthropological perspective situated in the practice and theory of biosocial studies, this book combines theoretical rigor with more applied and practice-oriented approaches and critically examines infectious and chronic diseases, reproduction, and nutrition.
Do ethnic Arabs or Palestinians have a future within the borders of the state of Israel? This book sets out to examine social fragmentation in Palestinian society and its effect on this future. Its focus is on those Palestinians who live within the boundaries of Israel but not under direct military occupation. The problems posed for these Palestinians by the so-called integrative option, and their responses to these problems, form the core of the study. How the integrative option is perceived, and either accepted or rejected, plays a key role in the social structuring of Palestinian society. Central to the study is one of the first presentations of the views of Palestinians based on in-depth polling, comparing the views of different social and regional segments of the Arab community under Israeli civil control. It deals broadly with relations between Jew and Arab, and between Arab and Arab, finding that Palestinian society is highly fragmented along familial, regional, religious, economic, gender, and generational lines. Ashkenasi seeks to demonstrate a sense of the reality of conflict and consensus, pragmatically presenting facts and not desires. The book begins with an explanation of the sociological structures of ethnic conflict in general and moves on to an examination of the political development of the pre-1967 Israeli Arab community, followed by a look at developments after 1967. The author then compares the actions and opinions of Israeli Arabs and Jerusalem Arabs, using data from his direct interview polling. How the Israeli Municipal Authority controls the Palestinian community is described, along with an analysis of how Palestinians view Jerusalem. In conclusion, the author finds that, based on his data, Arab leadership in the geographic area controlled by Israel has not achieved real consensus and organizational cohesion. He feels that the PLO tends to play a negative role in the conflict. In an epilogue, the underlying feelings of Palestinians toward the Temple Mount incident of 1990 are analyzed.
The dominance of "illness narratives" in narrative healing studies has tended to mean that the focus centers around the healing of the individual. Meza proposes that this emphasis is misplaced and the true focus of cultural healing should lie in managing the disruption of disease and death (cultural or biological) to the individual's relationship with society. By explicating narrative theory through the lens of cognitive anthropology, Meza reframes the epistemology of narrative and healing, moving it from relativism to a philosophical perspective of pragmatic realism. Using a novel combination of narrative theory and cognitive anthropology to represent the ethnographic data, Meza's ethnography is a valuable contribution in a field where ethnographic records related to medical clinical encounters are scarce. The book will be of interest to scholars of medical anthropology and those interested in narrative history and narrative medicine.
Recent archaeological scholarship along with technical and technological advances in near-surface geophysics has brought exciting new possibilities to a growing body of archaeological thought. Yet, few explicitly theoretical attempts have been made to provide archaeological geophysics with anthropological premises. Anthropological Research Framing for Archaeological Geophysics: Material Signatures of Past Human Behavior initiates a dialogue with other archaeological and geophysical professionals to do so. Most archaeological applications of geophysics remain methodological and technical, devoted to gaining awareness of buried anthropogenic materials but not human behavior. By proposing the amelioration of communication gaps between traditional and geophysical archaeologists, Jason Randall Thompson foments dialogue and participates in bringing about new ways of thinking anthropologically about archaeological geophysics.
Why are humans so different from each other and what makes the human species so different from all other living organisms? This introductory book provides a concise and accessible account of human diversity, of its causes and the ways in which anthropologists go about trying to make sense of it. Carles Salazar offers students a thoroughly integrated view by bringing together biological and sociocultural anthropology and including perspectives from evolutionary biology and psychology.
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A Harvard researcher investigates the human eye in this insightful account of what vision reveals about intelligence, learning, and the greatest mysteries of neuroscience. Spotting a face in a crowd is so easy, you take it for granted. But how you do it is one of science's great mysteries. And vision is involved with so much of everything your brain does. Explaining how it works reveals more than just how you see. In We Know It When We See It, Harvard neuroscientist Richard Masland tackles vital questions about how the brain processes information -- how it perceives, learns, and remembers -- through a careful study of the inner life of the eye. Covering everything from what happens when light hits your retina, to the increasingly sophisticated nerve nets that turn that light into knowledge, to what a computer algorithm must be able to do before it can be called truly intelligent, We Know It When We See It is a profound yet approachable investigation into how our bodies make sense of the world.
Each family has its secrets, ones that shape family communication and relationships in a way generally unknown to the outsider and often the family itself. Autoethnographers, students of these relationships, confront many silences in their attempts to understand these social worlds. Now issued as a Routledge Education Classic Edition, Accidental Ethnography delves into this shadowy world of pain and loss in the hopes of finding productive, ethical avenues for transforming the secret lives of families into powerful narratives of hope. It merges autoethnographic method with the therapeutic power of storytelling to heal family wounds. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in the field of qualitative research and on his own research journey since the publication of the original edition.
The first comprehensive study in English of the earliest and
largest 'Third-World' migration into pre-war Europe. Full attention
is given to the relationship between the society of emigration,
undermined by colonialism, and processes of ethnic organisation in
the metropolitan context. Contemporary anti-Algerian racism is
shown to have deep roots in moves by colonial elites to control and
police the migrants and to segregate them from contact with
Communism, nationalist movements and the French working class.
Migration and multiculturalism are hotly discussed in public debates across Europe. Whereas ethnographic research has begun to examine the Right in this context, the Left remains largely unexplored. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bologna - the show-case city of the Italian Left - this book provides fresh perspectives on how the contemporary Left "frames" these issues in practice and how such framing has changed in recent decades. By focusing on the official rhetoric grassroots discourses, policy and civil societal practices of the Left as well as on the immigrants' own views, this book timely offers a comprehensive, vivid, and critical account of changing ideas about ethnicity, class, identity and difference in "progressive" politics and of the implications that such ideas have for the incorporation of migrants in Europe. |
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